I bought a 1T My Book Elite for the sole purpose of doing backups. With administrator access, I expected to be able to backup anything the admin account had access to. After doing the install and initial 3 hour backup, I went to the Retrieval tab to test a recovery. I quickly realized that SmartWare hadn’t backed up any mail files and had skipped 90% of all documents. And not just for the other accounts on the machine (as noted in another thread), but all accounts, even for the Admin account I’d executed the initial backup from.
I started looking through the WD Knowledge Base and discovered that while SmartWare will backup various mail formats, including Outlook’s pst, it specifically excludes backups from the AppData\Local folder hierarchy where Outlook puts the pst files. Even worse, SmartWare also appears to specifically exclude performing any backups on the My Documents (XP) and Documents (Vista) folder hierarchies for all users.
Can someone please tell me how it’s useful to support the backup of almost 200 file types but exclude the folder hierarchies where a good number of those files are stored? Apparently, for me, the only thing SmartWare will backup is the Public folder (which only contains 10% of my files).
Is anyone using one of these things for backups? How are you doing it? Unless I’ve done something wrong, I have absolutely no use for this thing.
